Blogging for Knowledge Workers by Lilia Efimova

Those people, who know me rather well, would probably tell you folks how if I were to single out a specific and unique social software tool that has always been my all time favourite, and still is!, that would be… no, not Twitter, I don’t mean that one! … It’d actually blogging! Indeed, the fact I have been blogging for almost seven years has surely made me understand how much appreciate sharing a few lines here and there about the stuff that I’m passionate and use my own personal business blog(s) as my own voice to the world.

So you can imagine how excited I was when my good friend Lilia Efimova (a.k.a. Mathemagenic) invited me to participate in her recent PhD Research around the topic of blogging; with this particular title "Passion at work: blogging practices of knowledge workers" I just couldn’t say "No!". Thus we got together and did a Skype interview where I shared plenty of my views on what blogging is all about and what it means for knowledge workers today: to have a space where you can dump thoughts / ideas, develop them further with others, have meaningful conversations, build a network, or a community, around your blogging activities; in short, how blogging can help nurture your already existing social networks as well as becoming a rather powerful Personal Knowledge Management tool (As my good friends Bill Ives and Harold Jarche have been saying all along…).

You can read Lilia’s dissertation with plenty more insights, as well as a good bunch of other prolific, insightful bloggers’ interviews, over here [Direct Download Link]; perhaps at some point in time I will create another blog post, where I will share some further thoughts on what I learned from such a fundamental piece of research on blogging. For now though I would want to take this opportunity to point you into something else that I am sure you would find rather interesting as well …

As you may well know, as part of my current work duties I co-lead (With fellow IBM colleague, and good friend, Josh Scribner) a community of social computing evangelists, called BlueIQ Ambassadors, with over 1,000 members already, across 50 countries and all business units, whose mission is that one of helping accelerate the adoption of social software at IBM by providing lots of guidance, education, support, coaching, mentoring and facilitation for fellow IBMers on how to make good use of social tools as their preferred business collaboration & knowledge sharing tools.

Every month we host a bunch of community related events with plenty of interesting topics related to social software and its wider adoption within the enterprise. We even have got virtual water cooler sessions with no specific, nor set, agendas where ambassadors just network with one another learning from each other about what they are doing with their own social software adoption efforts. Some pretty cool stuff, if you ask me …

Well, this year we decided to spice things up quite a bit and host virtual events with external speakers, more than anything else to help bring a nice mix of both internal and external topics to talk about and share further along. And yesterday was our first instance of bringing in such external speaker. And, indeed, that was Lilia Efimova. With the topic of Blogging for Knowledge Workers, Lilia spent a bit over an hour going through a wonderful set of slides where she covered some pretty comprehensive materials on some of the main key points of what blogging has got to offer in the business value space. Not just for organisations, but also for knowledge workers themselves; all around with some pretty powerful messages on why blogging is such a worth while social business activity, both inside and outside of the corporate firewall.

You will be able to read further on about such event that we hosted yesterday if you go and check Lilia’s blog post on the topic under the title "Talk at IBM: Blogging for knowledge workers", where you will find plenty of interesting background links that will keep you busy reading some really good materials for a good while. In that post you would be able to find a link to the slides that she used for such virtual event and if you are interested in watching a replay, with both audio and video (As well as the chat transcript from the backchannel chatroom), we have managed to get that recording going and I am very pleased to share it with you folks…

You can go and grab it from here: Blogging for Knowledge Workers – Recording; it’s a 25MB download, but I can surely confirm it’s worth the time going through it; lots and lots of interesting insights on how blogging, despite the years gone by, despite that social networking sites are now more popular than ever (Much more than what blogs may well ever be), there’s still a place for blogs, like I have mentioned not too long ago when I talked about "The Second Coming of Blogging". Lilia’s talk surely makes plenty of great points of how blogging is now more relevant than ever before. And if not, go and watch through it, and judge for yourselves 😉

From here onwards, I just want to take this opportunity to give a big thanks!! to Lilia for being with us and make such a wonderful virtual event yesterday and for sharing her inexhaustible passion about blogging and its real impact for knowledge workers and their social networks. Wherever those may well be… Thanks ever so much, Lilia! It was just wonderful!!

Tags: Blogging, Blogs, Metablogging, Weblogging, Lilia Efimova, Mathemagenic, Dissertations, Passion at Work, Knowledge Workers, Ideas, Sharing Ideas, Bill Ives, Harold Jarche, PKM, Personal Knowledge Sharing, Personal Knowledge Management, BlueIQ, BlueIQ Ambassadors, Josh Scribner, Virtual Events, Community Events, Adoption, Social Software Enablement, Enterprise 2.0, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Computing, Social Media, Collaboration, Communities, Learning, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Remote Collaboration, Innovation, IBM, Networking, Social Networks, Conversations, Dialogue, Communication, Connections, Relationships, Productivity, Productivity 2.0